BIFOLD Research Colloquium "The evolution of Apache Kafka" (Jun Rao, Confluent)

Title: The evolution of Apache Kafka

Speaker: Jun Rao

Venue: Virtual event

Registration: If you are interested in participating, please contact coordination@bifold.berlin.

Abstract: Apache Kafka is a popular event streaming platform. It has been adopted by hundreds of thousands of organizations across the globe and by more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies. In this talk, I will first describe the history of Kafka: how it was invented, what problem it was trying to solve and how it has been evolving. Then I will describe a couple of real world use cases. Finally, I will outline some of the future work on this platform.

Bio: Jun Rao is co-founder of Confluent, a company that provides an event streaming platform based on Apache Kafka. Before Confluent, Jun Rao was a senior staff engineer at LinkedIn where he led the development of Kafka. Before LinkedIn, Jun Rao was a researcher at IBM's Almaden research center, where he conducted research on database and distributed systems. Jun Rao is the PMC chair of Apache Kafka and a committer of Apache Cassandra. He is the co-author of more than 20 referenced research papers, and the co-inventor of more than a dozen U.S. software patents.